Doing Social Media at the Museum: Student Spotlight

Hi, my name is Stephanie. I am a first-year graduate student in the Museum Studies program and a student employee at the VLSMOA. The museum functions a bit like a learning laboratory for museum studies students, who get hands-on experience in all aspects of museum work from collections to exhibit fabrication to marketing. Coming into the graduate program I had no experience in museum work and all these learning opportunities mean so much to me. When the museum faculty and staff approached me about taking on social media posts, I was so excited to learn a new facet of museum work. I will take you through my process of working on the social media for the VLSMOA.

Bringing these posts to life required a collaborative effort with the museum staff. I love brainstorming and possibilities, but at some point, ideas need to be narrowed down and options need to be quelled by realities. The museum staff helped me take my ideas and refit them based on their experience and knowledge of the museum. At this stage, ideas were adjusted and narrowed before becoming more concrete. I was left with four ideas of potential types of posts that were eventually narrowed down to two, Exhibit Preview and Student Worker Spotlight posts.

As you may have seen on our social media (if you have not, what are you waiting for? – Follow Us!) we have been making two posts a week. The first is called Exhibit Preview. This post highlights a panel or section of the museum. We are trying to highlight all our exhibits and their student fabricators and participants in these posts. The second post, Student Worker Spotlight, is intended to show our student workers who keep the museum running and show what they love about working in the museum. In my research, this was one of my favorite types of posts I saw. Especially being a campus museum, it is important to highlight how much students bring to the museum. Not only is there what the students bring in running the museum day to day but also the work students have done in exhibit creation. Getting to work with the students and finding out what inspires them about the museum has been a great experience. It helped me see the museum with new eyes. The students pulled out exhibits and panels I had not previously considered for showcasing.

Being a social media user in my personal life did not necessarily prepare me to be a social media professional. I knew what a hashtag was and how to create posts, but creating regular content spoken in the manner of a museum professional was a new challenge for me. Along the way, the lessons I learned were the most important to me (as cliché as it may sound). The first lesson I learned was to mitigate my own expectations. There are so many interesting and fun ideas for social media, and they continue to expand every day, but that does not mean I can enact them all tomorrow at the museum. Choosing a few projects and working to build them up is more important than having a lot of partially completed projects. The organization is another important factor. Building a calendar and schedule helped me track what I needed to post and when. Because of the nature of a student position, I am not at the museum every day making organization key to success.

Going forward, please look forward to more posts from our social media. We are hoping to continue to grow our presence and show more sides of our museum. If there is anything you would like to see showcased on our social media or if you have any suggestions, please reach out to us!